I bought a 2nd-hand Lenovo/IBM x60 Thinkpad about a year ago on Craigslist. Perfect condition, nice price, all legit-looking, and I'm using it now -- except that the guy had replaced the legit XP Pro with a bootleg installation of Windows7, without saving any backups or making rescue disks or anything. It worked fine and updated and everything, but I didn't want to run bootleg Windows, so I was determined to reconstruct the legit XP Pro SOMEhow. I had various Windows disks (incl. a non-legit install CD some vendor stuffed into my shopping bag) and a full set of recovery disks from my T40 Thinkpad.
It wasn't easy or quick, and didn't go smoothly, and I don't think I saved detailed notes on all the steps I took, but I finally got it running smoothly. XP Pro, SP3, with the same ID# as on the sticker, and enough updated drivers to run properly. I've been using it pretty happily for the past year, except that the speed has been disappointing. Recently, it's finally dawned on me that I'm only using one CPU core in the 2-core "Core Duo" CPU. That's presumably because the T40 only has a single-core CPU, and I used its XP setup (with some updated drivers, etc.).
Device Manager says my Computer is an "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC", not an "ACPI Multiprocessor PC".
Other than converting to Linux or buying a copy of XP Pro. . . is there a way I can educate this computer to use both of its CPU cores??
[Here's more details, and what I THINK I know about the problem:]
I think the problem is in the HAL = Hardware Abstraction Layer, and I've already tried using XPud Linux to substitute-rename the multi-core halmacpi.dll file from the SPFiles\i386 folder, making it the Hal.dll file in the System32 folder (which was formerly identical to the 1-core halacpi.dll in that folder -- no, not the halaacpi.dll file I expected to be identical). But the computer wouldn't boot Windows afterwards, so I substituted-renamed the Hal.dll file back -- successfully, without having to restore from an image. I'm guessing that there's another file or two that refer to that Hal.dll file that don't match up, but I can't find any advice online other than to re-install Windows. Since I still don't have the "real" Windows install CD for this Core Duo computer, I don't think that's a good option.
I feel a bit victimized here, because I'm going to a bunch of extra trouble to be legit, but I'm not being treated (by MS or Lenovo/IBM) as a valued customer. (I must have gotten at least 5 or 6 "You're a pirate!" error messages while I was trying to restore the computer to its original legitimate OS!)
Lenovo/IBM will sell me a new Rescue disk for $50 -- I bought one for an earlier Thinkpad, my T22, IIRC -- but I'm not confident that I'd get joy from that, either. (As I recall, the old one I bought didn't do everything I'd hoped it would do.) Plus, I'd rather not have to reconstruct and reconfigure all my software unless I have to.
BTW, I've wiped out the traditional IBM Rescue partition I had originally set up and merged it with C:. (I wanted the GBs.) I do still have an image backup of it, and I could restore it (and try using it), but there's no reason to believe that it would help, since it presumably came from my 1-core T40, not from a Core Duo machine.
Any suggestions?
Norm in Toronto
